Using MS SharePoint and ITIL Service Catalogs
I’ve been trying to find the time to do an IT Service Catalog for about a month now. An IT Service Catalog is a definition of what your IT department does and how to engage them. There is a description of what you do, whom to contact when you need to escalate, and service level agreements for each specific service.So here’s the idea.
The idea is to create a self service intranet portal where people will check there first before they call IT for common questions. This would drive down costs within IT as well as improve customer satisfaction. New hires don’t know who to contact for things IT takes for granted. They are an easy source for questions to populate a FAQ site is new hires both inside and outside of IT that have started in the past month. Their frustration level is high because so much of what we do in IT is undocumented. People who just started want to become productive fast and provided FAQs on an intranet site can increase their productivity. These questions are the same frequently asked questions that every new, and some existing, employees have every day. What IT can do is categorize them by functional area in the IT Service Catalog and then have members of IT answer them online. Version two would be to use a wiki so everyone in the company had the ability to ask questions as well as contribute to the knowledge of information.
We plan to use Microsoft’s Sharepoint Services to post the content on our department’s portal. I’ll let you know how it goes in about thirty days.
How did the creation of the IT Service Catalog go? Was there interest? Lessons learned? I have been approached to provide the same now that ITIL has caught on here.
Comment by Brien Core — April 8, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
The catalog was received well but there are a few things that continue to be a work in progress. The positives are that we can communicate it to new employees, executives, and others that need to understand a snapshot of what we do and who is responsible for the services. The negative in the current catalog is that it doesn’t have SLAs defined (yet) for response time to incidents. We are evolving it so we can include SLAs in the next version. If I had it to do over again, I would have launched it with easily obtainable SLAs so people’s expectations would have been set. You can choose whether you want to do it all at once or in phases like I did. Either way, the customer base will be very happy with your choice.
Comment by rontevans — April 18, 2008 @ 11:36 am